School Board revamps teacher salary schedule

Teachers will now be rated on effectiveness and demand to determine their pay after a new salary schedule was passed by the
Calcasieu Parish School Board.

Previously, teacher pay was based on degrees and experience. The new schedule will place degrees — along with geography, school
need and subject matter — under the demand category for evaluations.

“There are two types of teacher
evaluations: the value-added model, VAM, and the Student Learning
Targets, which is the SLT.
And those have different standards and different (rating)
processes,” said Karl Bruchhaus, the school system’s chief financial
officer.

“All the teachers are judged based on their performance ... the scores will determine what category they fall in as far as
their evaluations, and that will dictate their stipend.”

Both the SLT and the VAM determine a teacher’s performance based on how much academic progress students make over a certain
period of time. A teacher is placed in either the category of SLT or VAM depending on what subject they teach.

Teachers rated ineffective in the performance evaluations cannot receive a salary increase for the next school year. But any
increase in a teacher’s salary cannot be made up of more than 50 percent of any of the three rating categories.

“One of the things we wanted to do was make sure that a teacher receives no less than what they’re making right now, and by
doing what we’re doing we’ve complied to the best of our ability with what were supposed to do,” said Superintendent Wayne
Savoy.

“We have built in a supplement for those individuals, for example, who are at a particular area on our new salary schedule
that have starting working on a degree, and we’ve given them a deadline to complete it. And once they’ve completed it they
will be compensated for that.”

The salary schedule is related to the
Compass teacher evaluation system, which began in August. The initial
models proposed
by the state were not cost-effective for the Calcasieu Parish
schools, resulting in several months spent adjusting the schedule
while trying to keep the required mandates, officials said.

“What we’ve tried to do is take into
consideration where our employees are at now and how much money it costs
us to pay employees,”
Savoy said.

“We have projected forward over a
number of years to where the additional costs can be spread out because
this is all reoccurring
and teachers will move through the schedule. We have to be very
conscious of what is reoccurring and what the salary is because
once they reach that point we can’t take that money away.”

For outside teachers coming into the new system, the old salary schedule will be used as an addendum so that they can be plotted
into the new schedule. Teachers who are already in the system will be on the new schedule beginning July 1, 2013.